If you can’t report a pothole, how can you hold donors to account?
We recently attempted (and failed) to report a pothole near our office. It got us thinking about holding governments to account…
The organisation file: A veritable treasure trove!
How do I answer basic aid flow questions? Which donor is providing aid to a country and what is the future projection of that aid? More importantly, how does one put that aid data into the country context? Like me, many data users start with the OECD-DAC CRS data, which gives verified figures on commitments […]
Emerging donors = emerging transparency?
Saudi Arabia “is the number one donor for aid and development in Yemen”, according to Dr Abdullah al-Rabeeah, who runs the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre (KS Relief). “We’re here to help.” What the impact of Saudi’s aid is, however, we can’t really know. There’s no doubt the country has a sizeable aid […]
Redesign Data: Dueling dashboards
This blog was co-written by our US Representative Sally Paxton and George Ingram, Chair of Friends of Publish What You Fund. It was originally published on the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) blog as part of their Redesign Data series. The potential redesign of both the State Department and USAID – and their relationship to each […]
5 things we learned about IATI at the Africa Open Data Conference
This blog was originally posted on IATI’s website. It is written by James Coe (Publish What You Fund), Annelise Parr (IATI Secretariat & UNDP) and Reid Porter (InterAction). Last month, Ghana hosted the second Africa Open Data Conference (AODC). The event sought to showcase the thriving open data community on the continent, bringing together open data […]
Applause for USAID
When the US made the important commitment to aid transparency in Busan in 2011, it was applauded as a significant step toward more effective, evidence-based foreign assistance. The transparency road has been a bit bumpy, but some recent work by USAID in Bangladesh gives us some important reasons to cheer.